Ken Schaefer

We've all be able to use the DOM Inspector in Firefox. Now the IE Team releases the Developer Tooolbar for Internet Explorer. Quickly view the DOM tree, highlight tables, cells and divs, enable/disable page elements, and even be able to measure (via an on-screen ruler) the distance between two arbitrary points. Playing catchup with Firefox? Sure. But it's nice to have a toolset like this for when you're working with IE as well as when you're working with Firefox.

Check out the blog post on the IE team's blog for more information, and where you can report bugs. IE Developer Toolbar works with IE6 (and IE7 beta) on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.

I still haven't managed to find time to get some resources from Tech.Ed up - hopefully by this weekend. In the meantime, there's new things from Microsoft for everyone both developers and IT Pros.

Microsoft has launched a new site for its project codenamed "Atlas". Atlas, just launched at PDC 2005, is an implementation of AJAX for ASP.NET. Atlas will be part of .NET v2 (formerly "Whidbey"). On the site you can download documentation, quickstarts, the add-in for Visual Studio 2005 and the PDC Hands-On-Labs (HoL) VPC to play around with this right now. Want to know more about Atlas, and why it's better than Microsoft's previous implementation? Check out MVP Rob Chartier's post on the topic.

Also announced at PDC was LINQ (Language Integrated Query). Barry Gervin has a great post to lots of LINQ resources. In a one line summary, LINQ allows a developer to query a number of datasources directly from within their .NET code. See Introducing LINQ for example code.

Virtual Server 2005 is now available to those of you who have MSDN Enterprise/Universal subscriptions, which is a change to previous policy. Also available (or soon to be available) will be Vista Build 5219 (which was shown at PDC). This will be the first (of hopefully many) CTP (Community Tech Previews) of Vista, echoing the popular monthly release program of builds for Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005. See MSDN Subcriber Downloads.

Update Rollup v2 for Windows 2000 SP4 systems has been re-released after fixes for a number of issues with the original rollup where identified. You can get the updated rollup package from the Windows 2000 website. KB article 891861 describes the updated rollup package.